Q&A Chess Cover Reveal, Let's Go-o-o!

Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!

Happy International Chess Day! Given the occasion, we thought today would be the best day to make our biggest announcement yet.

This is it. The moment we have all been waiting for. Ever since we started writing our first draft. Ever since we ate the first croissant at our meeting at the bakery. Ever since our friend Peshka was created, still too young to talk.

Baby Peshka

Behold! The cover!

The official Q&A Chess: Tournament Edition front cover

Ta-da!

We might be biased, but we love it! Read on to learn more about our process creating it!

Shortly after we settled on a title (read about how we came up with the title here), on one cloudy morning in late autumn, we decided to take a short break from writing. So, we picked up pencils and started sketching ideas for the cover. Oh, the ideas we had! They were grand: How about have a drawing of a chess tournament playing hall? Maybe chess pieces as players and the position on the board should be from that wild game I had from last tournament?  How about just have a drawing of all the chess pieces?

The more we brainstormed the more we realized that less is more, so “all the chess pieces” became “three different chess pieces,” then became just “three pawns,” something like that:

An early cover draft

Then one day, Peshka grew big enough to say: “I’ll make it easy for you. How about just me on the cover?!”

At first, we created a black and white cover with Peshka and the chess board, but Peshka said: “Come on guys, splash some color on the cover!” After a lot of trial and error (do you know how many colors are out there?!? Ten million shades!!!), we decided on green, like a tournament vinyl chess board. In Procreate, the program we use to design our Peshka, there is this cool feature where you can upload a photograph and pick a color on that photo, to use it in your drawing, so that’s what we did to have as close match as possible.

Cover color ideas, almost like an Andy Warhol's piece

After that, it all came down to formatting, like the size and the font (do you know how many fonts are out there? Hundreds of thousands!). We decided on the size of our final book 5.5” x 8” and downloaded a cover template from the KDP Publishing website, and placed the title, names, and drawing there.

At the end, we like that our friend Peshka is in the spotlight on the cover, inviting everyone to open the book and learn more!

There you go! Please let us know in the comments if you like it!

Make every day chess day!

Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!

The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, The Legend Vivi